As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Information handling systems often include a number of hardware components, each of which may operate in accordance with firmware or other executable code. Often, updates to such firmware are required or advised in order to correct errors in the firmware code, add security to firmware code, and/or to improve features of the firmware code or hardware devices.
When updates are released by a hardware vendor, the hardware vendor often assigns a criticality to the update. Such criticality may be based on the various fixes or improvements delivered in the update. Such determination of criticality is often not very rigorous and often does not take into account an end user's usage environment and inventory of hardware components. Thus, a firmware update that may indeed be critical for one end user of an information handling system may not be critical for another end user of another information handling system.